CSotD: Friday Funnies – Undying humor

We’ve talked a lot about how politics have been sneaking over onto the funny pages, but now the funny stuff is sneaking over onto the editorial pages, as witness this K Chronicles (Daily Kos).

The punchline particularly put me on the floor since, as I think I’ve mentioned, Trump began his reign with a lie about the size of his inaugural crowd and ended it with a lie about the size of the Million Magat March.

The streak of dye running down Rudy’s head yesterday turned the whole thing to farce. It reminded me of the bizarre moment Rudy lost it, back when he was still the mob-busting hero of 9/11 who was running for the Senate against an utterly inexperienced former FLOTUS carpetbagger.

It looked very competitive until he announced he was withdrawing to deal with prostate cancer and also was getting a divorce, which his wife found out about by watching the press conference.

The GOP quickly swapped in a warm body whom Clinton trounced and history ensued.

As a cancer survivor myself, I won’t joke about that, but I’m also divorced and that part of his flip-out was not only hilarious but a symptom of the other thing his hair dye reminded me of, which is that we used to say, “You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown.”

“… it’s running down your head” is funnier, though the requisite set-up is comparatively rare.

Point being that, even in a political crisis, there is an element of farce that lightens things up.

 

And, as Mr. Boffo (Ind) suggests, there is an element amongst us who have not been fully engaged in the political/medical drama anyway. The fact is, the Earls of this world were perfectly content to sit in their Barcaloungers doing nothing until the CDC told them they had to.

They should be glad to have an excuse to have their burgers and fried chicken delivered instead of having to race out to pick it up at halftime, but, for them, an excuse to whine is even more welcome.

 

Which reminds me of back in the days before VCRs, when I lived in Denver and good Catholics went to the 9:30 Mass because Notre Dame football replay began at 8 and the Broncos game came on at 11.

This was in the days when you had only three camera angles and no Instant Replay and so going to the actual game was better.

However, the last NFL game I went to was up in the nosebleed seats where, like this fellow in In the Bleachers (AMS), we were surrounded by obnoxious drunks.

Only thing missing in his setup is a rig behind his chair to spill beer down his back.

 

The latest disruption being that the resurgence of Covid has called for canceling big gatherings of family for Thanksgiving, but, before the hard rules came down, Sally Forth (KFS) had planned to distance by holding the feast in the garage, prompting this futile attempt at clearing it out.

I think there’s been a lot of clearing out, not for Thanksgiving so much as because people are sitting around their houses going “How did it get like this?”

Some of it has even come to fruition, which I judge by the fact that we have lines of cars at the local thrift shop waiting to drop off the stuff they may not possibly miss and have two of, to the point where some of them are out blocking the street waiting to turn into the parking lot.

No fear. The rest of the parking lot is full of cars because people can’t get enough of other folks’ scrapings.

I did a story on garage sales several years ago in which I discovered that people from other countries consider our willingness to put our crap out on the lawn, and our willingness to purchase other people’s crap, utterly bizarre.

Though, come on, folks: It explains why we don’t have as many holidays and vacations as other countries. We have to get back to work to earn money to buy more crap we don’t need or don’t want or may possibly not miss or already have two of.

 

Baby Blues (KFS) has been giving me PTSD with a story arc about watching the classroom hamster.

My folks flew out to Colorado for Christmas, and we put them up at our neighbor’s house, since she was taking the kids back to Tennessee to spend two weeks with her folks. Win-win, and all I had to do was water her plants and tend the hamster.

The day before they returned, I cleaned out the cage and freshened everything, so I was surprised when she called and asked “What happened?”

Turns out the cheap plastic half-circle latch had not quite been set, and the fellow had had himself an ex-cape, slipping out of the cage and down the heat vents, where they could hear him scrambling around for several days until, well, things got quiet.

If I’d known how it was going to end, I could have just let the little bastard out on the first day and saved us all a lot of work and anguish.

Fortunately, he was the third or fourth of their hamsters to have suffered such a fate, so only I was traumatized.

 

Gary McCoy picked the best possible song for this Flying McCoys (AMS) gag.

Burt Bachrach and Hal David were the perfect team to write a theme song for a movie already titled “What’s New Pussycat?” because, in face of such restrictions, they regularly came up with such goofy lyrics that I once dressed up as a poet and did a straight-faced reading of their work at the campus coffeehouse to great effect.

Never mind “You and your pussycat lips.”

Read this in your best Richard Burton:

Mind you, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou beside me, singing on a road trip, and road trip were paradise enow.

But I wouldn’t expect it on a first date.

Sometimes it takes several years of a really good marriage: